Playing it smart: the Sony Xperia Ion review

A 12MP camera and great battery life are among the $99 phone's strong points.

After Sony bought out the mobile portion of its longtime Sony-Ericsson partnership, the company decided to join the smartphone war in earnest. If we don't count the niche Xperia Play, Sony is dreadfully late to the party, especially for a company that seeks to make as many of the screens a human being looks at through the day as humanly possible.

While some aspects of the phone seem to express disdain for the need to remain au courant (releasing the handset with Android 2.3 Gingerbread rather than the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, for instance), this is a solid entry at a mid-level $99 price point. Sony had prided itself in the past on occupying the high-end range of every product segment. But being new as it is to this space, it seems like it was a smarter choice for Sony to get its feet wet instead of trying to leap ahead to compete with the big names like Apple, Samsung, and HTC.

Hardware

The XP has a curved, brushed metal back with angled sides. A trapdoor on the left side hides a microUSB port and microSD slot, and a small section of the back about the camera slides off for access to the SIM. Since it's a Gingerbread phone, at least for now, there are four soft keys along the bottom of the screen: menu, home, back and search, from left to right. The icons are screened on underneath the glass, and small dash-shaped LEDs illuminate underneath them when they're activated. The hardware buttons (sleep, volume rocker, and camera) are all on the right-hand side.

As for holding it, the body of the phone feels like it sits right on the edge of a comfortable width (2.7 inches). I don't hold the phone in such a way that the curvature of the back came into play, so that was a non-starter; the angled sides were comfortable to hold, though.

Another interesting body-design grace note: when the Xperia Ion is resting face-up on the table, the only points touching are the bottom edge and the metal ring the encircles the camera. This may be a measure to both protect the camera lens as well as preserve the brushed metal back, which is susceptible to scratches.

Casey Johnston

Casey Johnston

The way the soft buttons respond to human touch is strange, unlike any Android phone I've ever used–that is, they seem unresponsive. When I first used the phone at CES, I guessed in my hands-on that I was just hitting them on the wrong spot, and should have been aiming for the lights, not the icons. As I used the phone more I found the problem wasn't where I was tapping, but how. The Xperia Ion needs, not taps, but real presses, where your finger gets a good square centimeter of contact for maybe a quarter of a second.

This seems like an picky distinction, but it really did have an effect on my experience–I would tap, tap, tap, still nothing, tap the light, tap the icon, tap the light, and then finally remember to press, and the phone would do as I commanded. Being that I've never experienced this before, I assume it's a software tweak from Sony, perhaps to mitigate the effect of accidental brushes against the buttons. But again in my experience, that's never been an issue, so it's solving a problem that doesn't need solving. At best, this will take a practiced user of any other smartphone a bit of time to get used to.

Screen, camera, sound

The Xperia Ion has a 4.55-inch 1280x720 display, and it's one of the better features of the phone. Everything, including text, looks very sharp. Color-wise, there's a warm cast to it below 75 percent brightness or so, and colors tend to look brighter than on other screens.

One odd omission for the Xperia Ion: there's no automatic brightness setting for the screen. There appears to be some kind of sensor under the glass next to the AT&T logo, but if it's an ambient light sensor, Sony simply chose not to make use of it. Sony had not yet provided comment on this matter at the time of publication.

One of Sony's big selling points for the Xperia Ion is its 12-megapixel camera. The company makes particular note of the fact that the phone can go from sleep to photo-ready in 1.5 seconds, and has a shot-to-shot time of less than one second. As with general performance, this is of note for this phone's price bracket, but there are a handful of phones that are quicker, including the Galaxy Nexus and now Galaxy S III.

In fact, the 1.5-second photo-ready feature is too smart for its own good: the phone lets users hold down the hardware camera button, and once that second or so has elapsed the camera app pops up on the phone. Basically, you may find yourself saying: "Hmm, all 16GB of storage on my Xperia Ion is full. What happened? Oh look, four thousand pictures of my pocket." There doesn't appear to be a way to turn this relationship with the button off, and it remains on even when we set a security passcode (in this case, the rest of the phone's features are inaccessible).(Update: a Sony spokesperson states that there is an option to turn the quick launch feature off by hitting the menu key in the Camera app, selecting "Quick launch," and then selecting "Off.")

The quality of the camera is quite impressive, especially in up-close shots; the picture of flowers above really impressed us. The flash seems to trigger a bit too easily in low light scenarios, though it's less bright than most of the LED flashes we see on smartphones. Indoor shots were a little grainy, and as shown by the photo of the plant waving a bit in the breeze of a fan, the shutter is none too quick.

Phone calls sound adequate on the phone, nothing notable there; likewise, my conversation partners said I sounded like I was on a cell phone, but it wasn't notably bad. The speaker on the back of the phone, though is terrible. Tragically bad, even at the highest volumes it sounds quiet (attention manufacturers: backwards-pointing speakers are probably the easiest from a design standpoint, but make zero sense for the consumer). This was decidedly a point of skimp, budget-wise. Expect nothing from this speaker, and you may still be somewhat disappointed.

Casey Johnston

Performance

A Qualcomm MSM8260 Snapdragon chipset powers the Xperia Ion, with a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and Adreno 220 GPU. The phone is able to access AT&T's 4G LTE network, which still has fairly limited availability.

Running GLBenchmark 2.1.4 on Android 2.3 (Android 4.0 is promised at a nebulous future date), the Xperia Ion gets middling scores: it cracked 35fps on the Pro-Standard test, but only 17fps on Egypt-High. For comparison, the Galaxy Nexus, which now retails at $149 with a two-year contract on Verizon, got 41.2fps and 19.9fps, respectively, on the same tests. On Linpack, the Xperia Ion pumped out 53MFLOPS and 95MFLOPS in single- and multi-threaded processes (the GNex got 45 and 37MFLOPS). This isn't bleeding-edge performance, but more than respectable for a $99 mid-range phone.

In subjective everyday use, we do occasionally see some of that animation stutter that was common in earlier Android phones, as if the visuals can't move as quickly as the hardware wants it to. But this was usually when the phone was just waking up or upon return to the home screen after using an app; after a couple of swipes, it seemed to be up to speed. Otherwise, the phone is fairly snappy all-around; the screen has none of the responsiveness issues that the buttons do.

How a phone picks up WiFi is usually not a point of note for our smartphone reviews, but we noticed that the WiFi signal on our Xperia Ion was quite low, even when two devices immediately next to it were picking it up perfectly. This could be due in part to the metal casing on the phone, a natural-born enemy of WiFi signal. We can't say if this is a widespread problem based on our one device and WiFi setup, but it's worth being wary of if you decide to check this phone out.

Casey Johnston

Battery

A sizeable 1900mAh battery powers the Xperia Ion, which Sony rates at 10 hours of talk time and 12 hours of music playback (whether WiFi/GPS is on and other such parameters are not specified). With WiFi, GPS, and 4G connections on, volume all the way up, we were able to get about seven and a half hours of battery life while playing video. In regular use with the same settings on, some light email, texting, photo-taking, a few app downloads and a bit of gaming, the phone was able to last a full day of use.

Sony without Ericsson still isn't quite up to the task of competing with the big boys—an iPhone or Galaxy S III this is not, especially being so woefully behind as to still be running Android 2.3. Still, we came out impressed, especially given the reasonable price point—hopefully issues like the handling of the camera button and soft keys, can be fixed with software updates. The Xperia Ion arrives in AT&T's online and retail outlets on June 24, priced at $99.99 with a two-year contract.

Good

Screen has excellent level of detail

Body looks pretty nice, when the brushed metal back isn't covered in fingerprints

Everything else being equal, more megapixels means smaller pixels, which in turn means less sensitive pixels... Which means worse low-light performance. Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider - but if you only mention the megapixel count, then you have absolutely no reason to be surprised by poor indoor performance from a camera with a high megapixel count (especially with phone camera, since they tend to have particularly tiny sensors).

Sigh, yet another phone with a hugely dense image sensor and a really crappy lens in front of it. Looking at the full size 12 Mpx shots taken with the Xperia Ion, there's about 4 Mpx "worth" of detail and resolution there.

Guys, seriously, back off on the sensors and put some good glass in front of them!

Also, Qualcomm should be deeply ashamed of itself. We still do not have Android 4.0 (ICS) hardware drivers for its MSM72xx and MSM82xx SoCs which are as fast or as stable as its Android 2.x (Eclair, FroYo and Gingerbread) drivers were. This, Qualcomm, is why nobody's putting your shit in ICS devices! It's retarding Android version adoption and it really shouldn't be tolerated.

In the worst case, an Adreno 220 GPU (about 20-30x more capable than the Adreno 200) runs at half Adreno 200's performance if the former is on ICS and the latter on Gingerbread. Tell me that Qualcomm's taking development seriously.

While I agreed with Sony doing what they did to stop the homebrew on the PS3, I'm pissed off at them for deciding not to put ICS on Xperia Play. After using ICS on my tablet, going back to Gingerbread is painful. Hopefully the class-action lawsuit will force Sony to make ICS work.

I love the hardware on my phone though. Too bad it doesn't have an HDMI port.

Edit for clarification: Sony had said that ICS was going to be put onto the Xperia Play and made that a strong selling point.

Everything else being equal, more megapixels means smaller pixels, which in turn means less sensitive pixels... Which means worse low-light performance. Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider - but if you only mention the megapixel count, then you have absolutely no reason to be surprised by poor indoor performance from a camera with a high megapixel count (especially with phone camera, since they tend to have particularly tiny sensors).

... she also mentioned the shutter speed was atrocious. And that the LED was a bit too quick to fire.

I wish that reviewers would understand that a camera's megapixel rating has NOTHING — literally nothing — to do with the quality of pictures. It ONLY has to do with how big a picture can be blown up and still maintain the right numbers of pixels per inch. The quality is determined by the quality of the lens and the sensor, NOT the number of pixels. A 1 MP camera can easily take better pictures than a 12 MP camera if it has better optics, but reviewer keep implying that we should expect more from a camera because of its megapixel rating. Please, please, PLEASE quit doing this. It's misleading and insane.

Nexus is $649 according to Verizon. I suspect that the Sony price on its website is intended to send you to a carrier, because it's the sort of inflated total bullshit price that carriers claim their phones are worth sans contract.

I'm shocked that you're holding the Galaxy up as the champion, on level with the iphone. It's got a plastic back, that's atrocious. That one thing should knock it down, and I'm not a fanboy of any maker, I have a $50 Optimus V, with, surprise, surprise, a plastic back that falls off if I drop it. There's no way I could drop $600 or whatever dollars (or worse, commit to a 2 year contract for the thousand dollars markup of VZW) for such a cheesy build.

Yes, I get it that no one can build like Apple or they get sued into oblivion, but this is too reminiscent of the PC reviews, where the specs are all reviewers seem to care about, and nothing about feel or appearance, and these things are even getting bigger and bigger like Wintel laptops did for a while, back in the mesozoic pre-MBA era.

You know what it reminds me of? The Corvette. The Corvette has a plastic body and incredible performance, but Ferrari would never have a plastic body. You can't be the best if you cut any corners, no matter what brand you have. Moto came out with carbon fiber, Sony has metal, iphone has metal. Flagship phones should have flagship construction. This is why we should have a real market for unlocked phones, not carrier backed centrally-planned corporate communism.

You seem to express disdain for the fact that "au courant" means "aware of", not up-to-date, which would be "à jour" (in the sense of updated), or "au goût du jour" (in a more fivolous sense; "à la mode" would work too)

When I play games, the majority of the times I accidentally press the Back button on my Xperia Mini. I don't know if that's why Sony made the buttons for pressing rather than touch, but I welcome that change very much because I do look forward to buying this phone.

I'm shocked that you're holding the Galaxy up as the champion, on level with the iphone. It's got a plastic back, that's atrocious.

You're being a snob. Good plastic doesn't break, doesn't scratch, doesn't have paint flaking off, and actually protects the innards by absorbing shocks a little. And it's lighter than metal, doesn't sractch, bump.... I'll take a plastic phone over a glass one anytime, and over a metal one almost anytime, too.

We can discuss plastic quality if you wish, there are thousands of variants. But insisting on old-school materials is not a rational position.

I wish that reviewers would understand that a camera's megapixel rating has NOTHING — literally nothing — to do with the quality of pictures. It ONLY has to do with how big a picture can be blown up and still maintain the right numbers of pixels per inch. The quality is determined by the quality of the lens and the sensor, NOT the number of pixels. A 1 MP camera can easily take better pictures than a 12 MP camera if it has better optics, but reviewer keep implying that we should expect more from a camera because of its megapixel rating. Please, please, PLEASE quit doing this. It's misleading and insane.

Agreed. The sensor size is also very important. I don't think the camera from this sony phone can take better picture than my good old Canon Powershot S30 which has a pretty large sensor size of 1/1.8" for Point&shot camera. Not to mention it's only 3MP.

I'm shocked that you're holding the Galaxy up as the champion, on level with the iphone. It's got a plastic back, that's atrocious.

You're being a snob. Good plastic doesn't break, doesn't scratch, doesn't have paint flaking off, and actually protects the innards by absorbing shocks a little. And it's lighter than metal, doesn't sractch, bump.... I'll take a plastic phone over a glass one anytime, and over a metal one almost anytime, too.

We can discuss plastic quality if you wish, there are thousands of variants. But insisting on old-school materials is not a rational position.

No, I actually agree, I love plastic. But there's a world of difference between a removeable (sounds flimsy) case like the s3, and say, the Nokia Lumia 900, which I have no special love for, but it's good design and a premium design. Now, I also think it's a bit silly that Apple's iphone has such great design that has to be covered with a case for practicality. Your positives about plastics would also be true of say, carbon fiber, or a more striking Lumia-style plastic design.

I really just think their competitors advanced the state of the art here, and Samsung is getting off easy because the carriers can get a better deal from them, and the press is so spec-crazy. I really do feel it's like the wintel laptop thing all over again, where any large screen and fast innards will overwhelm more thoughtful, useful, quality designs.

In fact, it's exactly the same with battery life, as the plastic cases enable 3rd party batteries that encourage poor battery life by design, which actually hurts quality. This happened to Windows laptops for years. The fact that I can plug into usb nearly anywhere and buy a 3rd party battery is no excuse for poor battery life and cheesy design out of the box. We're paying hundreds of dollars for something which isn't meaningfully better, but everyone just gapes at the stats, as if that's worth it.

I have no axe to grind against Samsung, I don't think Casey said anything wrong (just a difference of opinion) and I'm careful to show I'm not astroturfing any specific brand. I'm shopping for a high end Android and it's not what I expected (exactly what happened when I shopped laptops last year and ended up with a chromebook pre-ultrabook, yes, I'm an outlier).

I really just think this is a bad direction for the phone market. Some of the stuff they have in Europe, like waterproof, rugged designs (probably plastic who knows) make way more sense to me. At least the Razr innovated on water-resistance This galaxy seems just like new wine in an old skin. I'm concerned that things get worse thanks to a broken wireless market, dominated by companies with bad incentives for designed obsolescence/inferior performance. Look at how the Maxx was released after the Razr. There are no villains here, I'm not picking on Samsung or Casey specifically. There just seems to be a problem developing that might explain the iphone's resurgence.

You know what it reminds me of? The Corvette. The Corvette has a plastic body and incredible performance, but Ferrari would never have a plastic body. You can't be the best if you cut any corners, no matter what brand you have. Moto came out with carbon fiber, Sony has metal, iphone has metal. Flagship phones should have flagship construction. This is why we should have a real market for unlocked phones, not carrier backed centrally-planned corporate communism.

Ferrari has made fiberglass bodies like the Corvette. Try 700 or so Ferrari 308s.

Plastic is a boon when properly selected and designed for laptops and phones subject to being dropped. The plastic deforms and springs back. Metal and glass is not so forgiving. Plastic transmits radio waves far better than any metal. What is the primary use of our cellphones? That's right, radio. My plastic bodied MacBook gets better WiFi reception than any aluminum laptop, and I will be keeping it for road trips forever. My TiBook and AlBook both dented.

solomonrex wrote:

Now, I also think it's a bit silly that Apple's iphone has such great design that has to be covered with a case for practicality.

I think you are defining your work flow as everyone's work flow. There are a lot of people who use the iPhone without a case. A "problem" that can be fixed and customized in literally a thousand different ways for different tastes with the personalized purchase of a case that can cost as little as one buck makes it hard to say that Apple made the wrong decision. Personally, I love Apple's simple bumper and can't stomach it without, nor with a full cover. A little expensive at $30 but I just replaced it after two years for an identical (truly) third party copy for $6. But some will want a note pad, leather, or whatever.

You can also buy an iPhone 3g with a great build from plastic if you really think that trumps the latest and greatest with a perceived flaw that can be "fixed" for a couple of bucks.

You seem to express disdain for the fact that "au courant" means "aware of", not up-to-date, which would be "à jour" (in the sense of updated), or "au goût du jour" (in a more fivolous sense; "à la mode" would work too)

Muphry's Law has applied itself to you.

"Au courant" does mean up to date. The phrase that means "aware of"/ "familiar with" (which I think you are thinking of) is "au fait". (There may be a different meaning for these phrases when used in speaking French, but we are of course using English.)

You know what it reminds me of? The Corvette. The Corvette has a plastic body and incredible performance, but Ferrari would never have a plastic body. You can't be the best if you cut any corners, no matter what brand you have. Moto came out with carbon fiber, Sony has metal, iphone has metal. Flagship phones should have flagship construction. This is why we should have a real market for unlocked phones, not carrier backed centrally-planned corporate communism.

Ferrari has made fiberglass bodies like the Corvette. Try 700 or so Ferrari 308s.

Plastic is a boon when properly selected and designed for laptops and phones subject to being dropped. The plastic deforms and springs back. Metal and glass is not so forgiving. Plastic transmits radio waves far better than any metal. What is the primary use of our cellphones? That's right, radio. My plastic bodied MacBook gets better WiFi reception than any aluminum laptop, and I will be keeping it for road trips forever. My TiBook and AlBook both dented.

solomonrex wrote:

Now, I also think it's a bit silly that Apple's iphone has such great design that has to be covered with a case for practicality.

I think you are defining your work flow as everyone's work flow. There are a lot of people who use the iPhone without a case. A "problem" that can be fixed and customized in literally a thousand different ways for different tastes with the personalized purchase of a case that can cost as little as one buck makes it hard to say that Apple made the wrong decision. Personally, I love Apple's simple bumper and can't stomach it without, nor with a full cover. A little expensive at $30 but I just replaced it after two years for an identical (truly) third party copy for $6. But some will want a note pad, leather, or whatever.

You can also buy an iPhone 3g with a great build from plastic if you really think that trumps the latest and greatest with a perceived flaw that can be "fixed" for a couple of bucks.

Ferrari 308 was a long time ago, a time when fiberglass could marginally be considered cutting edge. Not it's carbon fiber, but that's neither here nor there. Point is, removable plastic backs are not cutting edge and it's an inferior choice for a 'flagship' phone.

No, I have no workflow, I don't care about my personal use case. I just see these OEMs going down a dead end street with these designs, aided and abetted by the carriers' desire for 2 year upgrade treadmills.

Yes, plastic has advantages, yes, I pointed that out and pointed out that they are not unique advantages (carbon fiber) nor do plastic cases have to be awful (Lumia). Why does the iphone continue it's rise if these phones have such better specs? I'm just pointing out a pattern here.

And I'm not saying Apple made a mistake at all, they make great kit and it's ironic that everyone has to cover it up. It's a postmodern first world problem, right?

But I like to think that tech will keep advancing and not get stuck on neutral due to bad incentives for bad design. There was a time when domestic cars were either small and cheap or powerful and expensive, with no in-between, there was a time when that was true of wintel laptops, now we've arrived at that with Android phones.

If we don't count the niche Xperia Play, Sony is dreadfully late to the party

Not sure i get the basis for this line, as Sony phones are a continuation of SonyEricsson (SE). And SE have been in the smartphone game for quite some time. Or is it that they have not gotten much of a toehold in the US market, and so the line is a cause of US mobile myopia?

Everything else being equal, more megapixels means smaller pixels, which in turn means less sensitive pixels

Off topic, but it's well past time for people to stop trotting out this simplistic disinformation.

Go and take a look at the high-ISO/shadow noise of the 36Mp Nikon D800. I'm not saying that the chip in the Sony is even remotely close, but the old mantra 'more megapixels = more noise' has been untrue for some time now.

Everything else being equal, more megapixels means smaller pixels, which in turn means less sensitive pixels

Off topic, but it's well past time for people to stop trotting out this simplistic disinformation.

Go and take a look at the high-ISO/shadow noise of the 36Mp Nikon D800. I'm not saying that the chip in the Sony is even remotely close, but the old mantra 'more megapixels = more noise' has been untrue for some time now.

Really? A you sure you don't mean that the Nikon has more pixels _and_ excellent low light performance? It can be done but it's never done in smartphones. Physical sensor area is also just a little bit different. Triple the pixel count, a much higher multiple for sensor area in the SLR.

99$ for this? I'm usually a Apple nut, and it take a lot to impress me (like the huge res boost to 400ppi on some droid screens, even if its overkill its amazing). But 99$ for this?? That's amazing! I really enjoy watching how much they can put into this to bring prices down to this level. .... 99$! Well done.

I really just think this is a bad direction for the phone market. Some of the stuff they have in Europe, like waterproof, rugged designs (probably plastic who knows) make way more sense to me. At least the Razr innovated on water-resistance This galaxy seems just like new wine in an old skin. I'm concerned that things get worse thanks to a broken wireless market, dominated by companies with bad incentives for designed obsolescence/inferior performance. Look at how the Maxx was released after the Razr. There are no villains here, I'm not picking on Samsung or Casey specifically. There just seems to be a problem developing that might explain the iphone's resurgence.

If we don't count the niche Xperia Play, Sony is dreadfully late to the party

Not sure i get the basis for this line, as Sony phones are a continuation of SonyEricsson (SE). And SE have been in the smartphone game for quite some time. Or is it that they have not gotten much of a toehold in the US market, and so the line is a cause of US mobile myopia?

They couldn't bribe, erm, coddle, erm suit the telco's very whim well enough.

Everything else being equal, more megapixels means smaller pixels, which in turn means less sensitive pixels... Which means worse low-light performance. Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider - but if you only mention the megapixel count, then you have absolutely no reason to be surprised by poor indoor performance from a camera with a high megapixel count (especially with phone camera, since they tend to have particularly tiny sensors).

... she also mentioned the shutter speed was atrocious. And that the LED was a bit too quick to fire.

You know, if you read the whole article instead of the final bullets.

Camera = bad because the software decided to use a lower shutter speed and turn on flash? For typical indoor photos, the subject is static and thus the shutter speed is fine. Further, some amount of fill flash improves most photos. This is probably a tradeoff for reduced noise.

Sony's probably better off advertising the camera as 6MP, and downsizing every photo taken to that. Will be so much better.

And LTE? I would rather they save money by excluding this.

The press to activate buttons seems like a better replacement for physical buttons. Not perfect, but way better than the stupid bs touch buttons.

Some more features:FM Radio with RDSFront-facing camera (1.3 megapixel, 720p)HMDI connectorDLNANFC

One is $99 and one is $199. What is wrong with giving both good reviews? They're in different price points.

When you factor in the two-year subsidy, it's more like $399 and $499, or something similar.

But more relevant, how do all the (subsidized) $99 phones compare to each other? Or, looking in the other direction, if cost really is a factor, how does a (again, subsidized) $99 phone compare to one that you can get for $0 on the same two-year contract?

How did a review of an Android phone running 2.3 with a mediocre camera that exists in a world where the Galaxy III and it's competition are available get a good review?

Here's the real bottom line: Anyone who drops $99 for this thing on a two year contract is wasting their time and money.

I wish Ars would just cut right to the chase on these things.

One is $99 and one is $199. What is wrong with giving both good reviews? They're in different price points.

Some people just aren't going to spend $200 on a phone. Some people don't need a $200 phone, crazy as it might sound.

I didn't bother listing all the alternatives but you're continuing the point I was making. For example the HTC Amaze 4G can be had for $0 on-contract, just got an ICS update, and is overall a better phone with a better CPU and camera.

Point being there are plenty of better alternatives to this thing, with or without a contract, and that's just in the *Android* space.

"The soft keys. Why are they so difficult? Just accept my loving taps."

Love it! Keep up the great writing.

That's a great screen on a $99 (contract) price. Agreed, good move by Sony to not try and head-on the flagship phones.

Also have to agree the 12MP sensor on a phone is silly. Marketing at the expense of quality. A same-physical-size 5MP sensor would do it better. And sigh... another Android phone with 2.3. Given this isn't a flagship phone, I'm going to go with "don't count on a 4.0 update" at all.